This is Liam Guilar's Blog, mostly about poetry, mine and other people's, and anything else of interest. Over the years it has unintentionally developed into an online poetry resource, check the names in the sidebar but Bunting, Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Tennyson and the medieval poets get fair coverage. Lady Godiva and Me was a sequence of poems that linked Lady Godiva, both the historical Godgifu and the legendary Lady G, to a character growing up in the city of Coventry after the second world war.
You can see a short film about the collection Here.
My most recent book of poems, Anhaga is published by Vanzenopress and avialable or my website. Further information, full length articles and sample poems are available on my website Here .

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Saturday, January 25, 2014

This poem, by John Hewitt, should be better known, so as it's today of all days, I'd like to post it here. For an Irishman in Coventry, and his English wife. My Apologies to anyone if it infringes copyright.

An Irishman in Coventry

A full year since, I took this eager city,the tolerance that laced its blatant roar,its famous steeples and its web of girders,as image of the state hope argued for,and scarcely flung a bitter thought behind meon all that flaws the glory and the gracewhich ribbons through the sick, guilt-clotted legendof my creed-haunted, godforsaken race.My rhetoric swung round from steel’s high promiseto the precision of the well-gauged tool,tracing the logic in the vast glass headlands,the clockwork horse, the comprehensive school.Then, sudden, by occasion’s chance concerted,in enclave of my nation, but apart,the jigging dances and the lilting fiddlestirred the old rage and pity in my heart.The faces and the voices blurring round me,the strong hands long familiar with the spade,the whiskey-tinctured breath, the pious buttons,called up a people endlessly betrayedby our own weakness, by the wrongs we sufferedin that long twilight over bog and glen,by force, by famine and by glittering fableswhich gave us martyrs when we needed men,by faith which had no charity to offer,by poisoned memory, and by ready wit,with poverty corroded into malice,to hit and run and howl when it is hit.This is our fate: eight hundred years’ disaster,crazily tangled as the Book of Kells;the dream’s distortion and the land’s division,the midnight raiders and the prison cells.Yet like Lir’s children, banished to the waters,our hearts still listen for the landward bells.

– John Hewitt

In my head it's grouped for some reason with Paul Brady's "Nothing But the Same Old Story", which he would never have endorsed:

Sunday, January 19, 2014

In
The Social Function of Poetry Eliot
tried to negotiate the contradictions. There is an obvious tension in the essay
between what he tries to claim for poetry and what his intelligence tells him
is the way the world works. Part of this tension may be created by the context of this talk.

He began with a note of caution that
could easily haveserved as an
epitaph for every attempt to discuss either “the function of poetry” or “the
role of the poet”:

When we speak of the ‘function’ of
anything we are likely to be thinking of what that thing ought to do rather
than what it does do or has done. That is an important distinction because I do
not intend to talk about what I think poetry ought to do. People who tell us
what poetry ought to do, especially if they are poets themselves,usually
have in mindthe particular kind of poetry they
would like to write. (SFP p3)

But
his history is no better than Pound’s or Shelley’s (this surprised me):

A superior language can seldom be
exterminated except by the extermination of the people who speak it. When one
language supersedes another it is usually because that language has advantages
that commend it, and which offer not merely a difference but a wider and more
refined range, not only for thinking and feeling, than the more primitive
language”(SFP, 8)

Linguistically,
Eliot’s statement date him as badly as Shelley’s do.“There are, however, several widely held misconceptions
about Language…The most important of these is the idea that there are such
things as primitive languages-languages
with asimple grammar, a few
sounds, and a vocabulary of only a few hundred words, whose speakers have to
compensate for their language’sdeficiencies
through gestures”(Crystal
2006).

Eliot
ironically echoes those scholars who once dismissed English as a language incapable of precision.

He
alsoseems to be willfully ignoring
the historical fact that “advantages’ were often political rather than
linguistic. Old English did not disappear because Anglo-Norman had a wider and
more refined range, but because the English Aristocracy was all but eradicated
in three battles in 1066 and from the end of the 11th Century to the
middle of the 14th Century French was the privileged language,the kings of England did not speak
English, and anyone who wanted to deal with either the law or the
administration had to learn French or Latin.Irish and Welsh almost disappeared as native languages not
because they were inadequate but because the people inpower banned them and refused to
communicate in those languages.

Eliot
does try to address the obvious contraction: how does original poetry, making
demands on its small but elite readership, affect the health of the culture?
His answer is confused ( I find it very difficult to write that about
T.S.Eliot). It could only work in a “homogenous culture” where the elite
readership of the best modern poetry are in fact the cultural elite, the people
who matter. Others will want to follow their example, sothere will be an inevitable trickle
down effect which will eventually spread the influence of poetry throughout
society. Gioia states the same argument.Both writers ignore the fact that modern culture is not homogenous (even
the England of Eliot in the 1940s wasn’t).Neither reading nor writing poetry in English has
guaranteedmembership of a
cultural elite, apart from the self appointed ones we’ve been studying. Sidney
belonged to a cultural elite who others copied because he was born into the
aristocracy and connected to some of the wealthiest families in the
country. His birth guaranteed his
social status: his status validated his poems. Not the other way round. Sir Ernest Gower’s 'Plain
words" and I A Richard’s “Practical Criticism” in their own ways underline
the limitations of the linguistic
skills of the “cultural elite”.

Eliot,
like Pound, and Shelley, and Gioia and other s after him, confused cause and symptom and
fell victim to his own muddled metaphor. (I find that really hard to write
about the first two as well) Language is not an organic plant that flowers if
fertilised with great poetry and withers if forced to survive on a diet of
..whichever poet you think is not great. Even if it were possible to define what is good and bad
poetry against an objective standard, and avoid the inherent moralizing,it is difficult to believe any culture
died because of bad poetry or any language disappeared for Eliot’s
reasons.

A language disappears
becausethe people who speak it
die out, and according to modern linguists, of the world’s 6,000 or so languagesperhaps half will die out in the
present century (Crystal 2008 p 336). The disappearance of cultured literary
productions may be one symptom of a
society more concerned with survival. As Stead also observed, it is impossible
to imagine how poetry improves the health of a nation.If Eliot and Pound were right,
then given their strictures about the state of English poetry,England should have lost the First
world war.

Anyone
trying to make this argument is guilty of confusing symptoms with causes and in
Rosemary Waldrop’s words acting “
as if there existed nothing but society on the one hand andwriting on the other” (Bernstein 1990). Eliot acknowledges this
and then ignores the implications, presumably because they would invalidate the
claims he is making. Waldrop succinctly points out the obvious objection: The two decades before Hitler came to power
were a period of incredible literary flowering, upheaval, exploration in
Germany. All the dadaists and expressionists had been questioning, challenging,
exploring changing the language,limbering up its joints. So the German language should have
been in very good condition, yet the Nazis had no trouble putting it to work
for their purposes, perverting it to where what was said was light years from
what was meant. So while language thinks for us, there is no guarantee that it
will be in a direction we like. (In Bertstein p47)

This destructive wander through the
Defences was one way of stripping away the accumulated waffle to see what, if
anything is left. I think there’s a great deal, but it doesn’t rely on silly
claims for what an abstraction called ‘Poetry’ obviouslydoesn’t or can’t do now, and never has
done in the past.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

In
the twentieth century, writers continued to make claims for poetry and poets,
and despite their often hard-headed approach to the writing of poems and their
critical evaluations of individual poems and poets,they maintained the circulation of the claims already
discussed, stating as fact what was little more than wishful thinking. Not only
did they continue to attract a modernised version of Peacock’scriticism, they seemed unable to see
that the simple opposition between “the world” and“poetry’ was painfully inadequate.Their history was often little better than Shelley’s, and
their understanding of how languages work surprisingly naïve.

Claims
for the social function of poetry ignored the complex nature of any historical
movementalthough Eliot had it both ways, saying that the problem was very complex and
then making statements that ignored that complexity. Many
of their claims relied on a belief in the existence of an absolute unchanging,
a-historical definition of “good poetry”which allow the critic, at a distance, to declare what is good or
bad.

So Ezra Pound
and T.S. Eliot were the leading figures in a rebellion against the stifling
mediocrity of the field (in Bordieu’s sense) of poetry that they entered at the beginning of the 20th century. In
their different ways,they would define the dominant poetic of the twentieth century.

What
both wrote about the craft of writing poetry remains as challenging,
provocative and useful today as it was when they wrote it.Yet both were inclined to make claims
for an idealised art which carry echoes of Sidney and Shelley at their most
romantic. Pound’s ABC of Reading is a willfully cantankerous book which I
would recommend to anyone interested in reading and writing poetry,but it contains statementsShelley would have found very
acceptable.

By
insisting that poetry is an art which requires “sharp study and long toil”,
which should be subjected to clear and intelligent scrutiny,both Pound and Eliot established the
basis for a poetry that could be a serious art and not just the effusions of
the nursery or the well meaning amateur.By insisting on the poem as the thing in itself, not the pack horse for
a bad philosophy or a slogan for a political meeting, they cleared a way past
the popular insistence on judginga poet by “what he says” or “as a thinker”, past a poetry of reassurance, to a poetics where the
arrangement of vowels and consonants were the poet’s primary task

But if the poet’s job is the arrangement
of vowels and consonants, if the first and only duty is to the art, how to
avoid the damaging association of the derided slogan: “art for art’s
sake”.The Gordian knot solution
would have been to say the writing of poems is sufficient end in itself: does the musician have to justify his
music? There are times when both Pound and Eliot come close to this:Poundwrote in ‘The Serious Artist’

Now art never asks anybody to do
anything, or to think anything or to be anything. It exists as the trees exist,
you can admire, you can sit in the shade, you can pick bananas, you can cut
firewood, you can do what you jolly well please.

The
logic of this is to accept that the poet, as poet,has no social function other than the writing of poems and
if that gives readers pleasure and critics something to write about that is an
added bonus: a position held and espoused by Robert Graves and, towards the end of his life, by Basil Bunting.

Eliot acknowledges, amongst poetry’s ‘obvious functions’the first is the ability to produce the
kind of pleasureonly poetry can
produce.But neither Eliot nor
Pound was willing to accept the Gordian knot solution. Both wanted to show
that poetry was vital to the health and functioning of society.

Why?

Well having seen it in Sidney and Shelley the
move should now be familiar. Elevate ‘Poetry’, and you elevate the Poet.
Hammering away on your type writer, unable to make a living from your poems,
known only to four or five people, you can make believe you areSuperman, able to shape the course of
history without moving from the typewriter.

And
most of the time, in democratic countries,Power doesn’t care about Poetry, so the poet, like any street
corner nutcase who thinks she’s the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary,can make any claim she likes as
long as she doesn't break the law.

When
those with real power do notice the poet, the reality of the poet’s
insignificance becomes painfully obvious.But I’ve written about that before:

Pound
could make blunt statements about an idealised poet and poetry which echo the
claims and methodology of all those writers on poetry stretching back to
Sidney:

Good writers are those who keep the
language efficient. That is to say they keep it accurate , keep it clear. It
doesn’t matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the bad
writer wants to do harm….(Pound 1934 p 32)

We may say that the duty of the poet,
as poet,is only indirectly to his
people: his direct duty is to his language, first to preserve, and
second to extend and improve.(SFP 9)

Exactly
how writing poetry extends and improves language is never explained. It is a
familiar claim, a commonplace of the blurbs which adorn modern poetry books, and
is a good example of how the limited field that is poetry can re circulate what
appears, to someone outside it, to be nonsense.

Stephen Pinker uses a quote from
W.H.Auden to characterize what he calls “The Jeremiahs”:

‘As a poet there is only one
political duty and that is to defend one’s language from corruption. And that
is particularly serious now. It is being corrupted. When it is corrupted ,
people lose faith in what they hear, and that leads to violence.’

The linguist Dwight Bollinger, gently
urging this man to get a grip, had to point out that “the same number of muggers
would leap out of the dark if everyone conformed overnight to every
prescriptive rule ever written” (Pinker 1994 385).

Yet
both Eliot and Pound could ignore history to make broader claims for Poetry.

But most people do not realize that
this is not enough; that unless they go on producing great authors, and
especially great poets, their language will deteriorate, their culture will
deteriorate and perhaps become absorbed in a stronger one. (SFP 10)

Shelley,
had made a similar claim though left it to the reader to decide what was cause
and what was effect. Historically such a claim will not stand scrutiny but Dana
Gioia quoted Pound’s claim above about the relationship of language to culture as
though it were fact and proof that poetry “matters”. He tried to qualify it: Poetry is not the entire solution to keeping
the nation’s language clean and honest…without explaining what “clean and
honest” could mean in this context, but then fell back into the typical organic
metaphors for language and some very dubious logic: but one Is hard pressed to imagine a country’s citizens improving the
health of its language while abandoning poetry(Gioia
1992)

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Does any of this
really matter? Who cares what some disappointed aristocrat wrote to soothe his
sense of career failure or some towering egotist wrote to massage his own enormous sense of
self-importance while living the high life in Italy?

Yes it does matter. We should care. To quote Pierre Bourdieu:

In an artistic field which has reached an
advanced stage of its history, there is no place for naïf’s: more
precisely, the history is immanent in the functioning of the field, and to meet
the object demands it implies, as a producer but also as a consumer, one has to
possess the whole history of the field.

There is far too much historical amnesia in the current discourse about poetry

Or to put it another
way, the whole house of cards that constitutes the field of modern poetry: the
way we talk about poetry,its obligatory
use in schools when the majority of any population, including the people
teaching it, don’t read it for pleasure, the way it is treated in University
writing programs, the claims made by governing bodies, the fact we have
governing bodies,attitudes
towards publication and reception, restson these
works, and the way they have been recirculated in a sealed acoustic where the
phrase “where is your evidence?” has been treated as a sign of unbearable naivety by those guilty of a much more fundamental naivety.

So before going on to Pound
and Eliot

1) The modern world; some scattered observations

In what follows I want
to briefly look at some contemporary examples.This is not meant to be exhaustive, just an illustration, and space does not allow a detailed
analysis of each example.I’ve
already mentioned a couple of posts back about the 2013 “A Poet, Cheating for
money?” scandal, the bizarre things and in previous posts about the way we talk about Poetry in the
way we talk about no other art.

Examples can be easily
found in any contemporary discussion or use of poetrybut Paul Dawson’s Creative
Writing and the New Humanities(2005),and Terry Eagelton’s How to Read a
Poem (2007)will serve as one example.Both take for granted Sidney’s argument
about the power of Poetry.

According to Dawson
the purpose of modern creative writing courses should be to turn out “literary
Intellectuals” who will be “oppositional critics”. Oppositional criticism being:
textual or cultural critique of received opinions, with the
ultimate aim of affecting social change , or at least an alteration of public
opinion , beyond the refinements of disciplinary knowledge (p.201). This is an extension and variationon the romantic ideal of the outsider artist, given its most
famous poetic expression in Shelley’s Defence.The claims for Poetry
as an active participant in contemporary political processes, able to affect
the community at large,flounder
when one tries to see how this could operate outside the seminar room or find
an example.

Analysing the ideology
of poems written in the past, Terry Eagleton’s preferred method (Eagleton 2007), or discussing the ideology of poems written
in the work shop (Dawson)assumes poetry has inherent power over
the reader which apprentice poets need to learn to use in appropriate ways (for
which read, ways approved by the resident lecturer) (Dawson) and readers need
to learn how to resist (but only what and in ways approved by the resident lecturer) (Eagleton).

This is based on the equally traditional
belief that poetry “delights and instructs”,an idea that goes back in English to Sidney but beyond him
to Horace.Such an approach
reducespoetry to a carrier of
ideological virusesand poems to
content,just as the reviewers of
the late nineteenth century judged a poet for “what he [sic] said”.

However,at no stage can either Dawson or Eagleton, or
anyone else, show how studying poetry this way prepares the student to do
anything other than study poetry in this way.When put blandly: Poetry
isthe art of using words charged to their
utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape,
appreciate and understand the power of language will become slaves to those who
retain it-be they politicians, preachers, copywriters or news casters(Gioia 1992) can seembaffling in its casual arrogance.

Who are these
self-appointed “intellectual leaders”. Gioia’s title Can Poetry Matteris a
Koan likeencapsulation of the
problem. It assumes “Poetry” means the same thing to everyone, and that it can
and should “matter” to everyone, in the same way for the same reasons.

Even when the writer
seems to be distancing herself from previous claims, she can betrapped into recycling them. In an
article published in the English Guardian in 2006 Adrienne Rich began by
quoting Shelley’s famous statement and then qualified what she was discussing.

I hope never to idealise poetry - it has
suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional
massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an
instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only
poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they
belong.

But by the end of the
article, which is only 995 words long,she has forgotten this and is writing about “Poetry’ as if it were all
the things she has just claimed it is not:

Poetry has the capacity to remind us of
something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still uncreated site
whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the
subjection of women, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of
freedom - that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the "free"
market. This on-going future, written-off over and over, is still within view.
All over the world its paths are being rediscovered and reinvented (Rich 2006).

My final brief example
is from outside academic discussions. In the 21st Century,despite its miniscule share of the book
market, (last year Britons apparently spent more on Pringles Chips than poetry books) despite the invisibility of poets for the majority of the population, Poetry rather than poets or poems, still
has a privileged cultural position.

In 2009 the British based poetry publisher
Salt was in financial difficulties. Faced with impending bankruptcy it launched
an appeal called“Save Our Salt”. [1]Salt claimed that unless X number of books
were sold in a limited time, it would be finished.Word spread around the blogosphere, news outlets picked up
the story, Salt sold its required number of books and the crisis was
temporarily averted.

At the time it seemed
like a small but interesting example of the strange position poetry occupies in
modern culture. It was difficult to imagine General Motors Holden for
example,during one of its regular
financial crisis, appealing to the American consumer in a similar manner.“We are going broke because you don’t
want our product. Please buy the product you don’t want so we can continue to
make the make the product you don’t want.”

In 2010, faced inevitably
with the same problem, Salt relaunched their campaign with the following
statement from Griff Rhys-Jones on the website:

Support the good work here. Don’t let
Salt fall. If the recession is going to take things down, let it be motor
manufacturers, let it be bad banks, let it be chains of fast food restaurants.
We can lose a few of them, but we do not have enough small independent and
daring publishers like Salt. I think I can be a little more forthright than
Chris and say ‘Just six books’. Buy dozens why don’t? It’s a great list. And
apparently you will help the economy in many subtle ways too complicated for
studious folk like us.[2]

For many British
communities the devastating social, economic and cultural effects of the
closure of major industrial operations like ‘Motor Manufacturers’are too familiar.Why these might be lesser than the
disappearance ofa small poetry
publisher raises questions, not just about the values of “studious folks like
us”,but about their attitudes to
poetry.Referring to an idealised Poetry,Jones cannot explain how poetry will help the
economy in many subtle ways. Nor can he help but reveal the clubby sense
that “bookish folk like us” feel they are rather superior to the masses who
rely on motor manufacturers and fast food restaurants.

So this tracking of the
defences is not “history” in the sense of something past and finished:whether or not Poets were prophets in
the early stages of an unspecified culture is of academic interest in the
derogatory sense of that term. Barbers were, until recently, surgeons, but nobody goes to one today for open
heart surgery.This is a history,
in Bourdieu’s terms which is immanent in
the functioning of the field.How
individual writers or teachers situate themselves depends to a large extent on
which versions of Poetry and Poet their craft is based on. To use another Bourdieu quote;

This is why…it is so important if one is to have a bit
of freedom from the constraints of the field, to attempt to explore the limits
of the theoretical box in which one is imprisoned.

And so onwards to Pound and Eliot.

CE: As with all these posts, you are welcome to use them as long as you acknowledge your source. Referencing has been removed as a small anti-plagiarism device. If you contact me through the comments I'll happily supply them.